A cursed chest of Confederate silver, two Union deserters, and a border town that cannot get rid of either. That is the setup for The Curse of Silver, and Lily Gladstone and Kiowa Gordon are the ones dragging the chest into town.
Deadline broke the casting on Monday. Geoff Marslett directs, with Gordon co-directing, from a script Marslett wrote with Rafael A. Ruiz. Liz Cardenas, who produced A Ghost Story, is producing with Ram Getz. Gladstone, Gordon and Michael Mortensen are executive producers.
The logline puts the deserters on the lawless Texas-Mexico border after the Civil War, hauling the trunk into a town already under siege and setting off supernatural violence they did not plan for. It is billed as a horror western, which is a shelf that stays mostly empty.
Kiowa Gordon Has Done This Before
Outside the genre, Gordon is Embry Call across four Twilight films and Jim Chee on AMC’s Dark Winds, which has a fifth season coming. Horror knows him from somewhere else. He was in Blood Quantum, Jeff Barnaby’s 2019 film about a Mi’kmaq reserve whose residents turn out to be immune to a zombie plague, which iHorror reviewed out of TIFF. That film knew the difference between a siege and an occupation, and a besieged border town is the same argument with different weather.
The bigger move is behind the camera. Gordon co-directs with Marslett, which puts a working genre actor in charge of the picture he is starring in.
Gladstone Is Producing It, Not Just Starring In It
Gladstone took an Oscar nomination out of Killers of the Flower Moon and spent the time since on smaller and harder films. She is an executive producer here as well as the lead, which is the more interesting half of the announcement: the project she attached her name to behind the scenes is a ghost story about stolen money.
The Film Still Needs Its Money
There is no start date. The Curse of Silver is one of 80 projects selected for the Gotham Week Project Market, which runs September 27 through October 3 in Brooklyn, and that market is a financing showcase rather than a production announcement. Marslett’s last feature was Quantum Cowboys, a rotoscoped western, so the frontier is ground he has walked before.
Horror westerns arrive rarely and land hard when they do, because the form hands a monster somewhere genuinely empty to hunt in. A cursed trunk on a border nobody controls, carried by two men who already ran from one war, is the right kind of empty.
